Dolores, my landlady and mistress of the Sacristy, was an agreeable, exceedingly energetic, exceedingly hard-working woman, who was a pronounced conservative.

I have met few women as good as she. In spite of the fact that she soon discovered that I was not at all religious, she did not hold it against me, nor did I harbour any resentment against her.

I often read her the AÑalejo, or church calendar, which is known as the Gallofa, or beggars' mite, in the northern provinces, in allusion to the ancient custom of making pilgrimages to Santiago, and I cooked sugar wafers over the fire with her on the eve of feast days, at which times her work was especially severe.

I realized in Cestona my childish ambitions of having a house of my own, and a dog, which had lain in my mind ever since reading Robinson Crusoe and The Mysterious Island.

I also had an old horse named Juanillo, which I borrowed from a coachman in San Sebastian, but I never liked horses.

The horse seems to me to be a militaristic, antipathetic animal. Neither
Robinson Crusoe nor Cyrus Harding rode horse-back.

I committed no blunders while I was a village doctor. I had already grown prudent, and my sceptical temperament was a bar to any great mistakes.

I first began to realize that I was a Basque in Cestona, and I recovered my pride of race there, which I had lost.